ES1501A

ES1501A - Up Close and Public: Designing Public Persona

A vital element in giving an effective public performance is presenting a credible persona. In this course, students will examine concepts such as role and identity, speaker credibility, talk and gestures, and audience perception. They will explore the innateness and invention of specific speech traits and behaviors – with a focus on how a public persona is strengthened or attenuated, and shaped – by analyzing various performances (i.e., interview, roundtable discussion, public talk, and the US Presidential Debate 2012). The course assignments expect students to demonstrate both understanding of these human communication concepts and specific applications of their analysis outcomes in constructing a credible public persona in presentations.

It is a 48-hour module taught over 12 weeks with 2 two-hour tutorials per week.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have developed an approach to be able to:

  • strategically read various texts (i.e., print and non-print/broadcast);
  • evaluate authorial arguments and supporting evidence in these texts;
  • apply relevant communication theories and appropriate methods in constructing academic texts on public persona;
  • practice academic integrity (i.e., demonstrate acceptable text borrowing practices in the construction of both written and oral texts);
  • revise academic texts for purposes of accuracy and appropriacy for differing audiences;
  • demonstrate their understanding of verbal and nonverbal discursive practices in class discussions on role, identity, and persona;
  • extend their understanding of analysing interactions, identities, and roles to their own analysis of talk/chat/broadcast interview; and
  • perform a construction of individual students’ public persona in class presentations.

Assessment

ES1501A is a 100% Continuous Assessment module.

Prerequisites

If students are required to take ES1000, Basic English, and/or ES1102, English for Academic Purposes, they must complete those modules before taking this course.

FOE students should have obtained an A grade in the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ level General Paper in order to be eligible for this module.

Preclusions

U-Town Writing Programme modules IEM1201A-L WP2201,ES1201L and all other ES1501 modules
Note:

  • FOE students will be exempted from ES1531 and ES2331 if they have successfully completed an ES1501 module. 
  • ES1531 and ES2331 are optional for FOE students who have successfully completed an ES1501 module.

Modular Credits

Four

Workload

0-4-0-0-6